Transylvania
Braşov, apparently, was not affected by the short century. Its center is a pedestrian any central, crowded in the late afternoon by its inhabitants. A man over sixty sits alone on one of the many benches in the square Sfatului. On a short-sleeved pink shirt wearing a gray vest and a red tie, pants and shoes are blacks, but not by the clothes denotes wealth. The gray hairs are imbrillantinati back and smoke a cigarette with the mouthpiece. A family enjoys a bench front of her, about five meters: father, mother and child of two years crying out loud. The man gets up, pulls out a candy and goes to the child. Attracts his attention and hands her candy. The child stops crying. The man turns and goes back to the bench, with a broad smile of satisfaction on his face.
A couple sits on another bench, browsing with a tabloid scandal. Read and comment aloud, with the participation, at times it hotly. He has at least seventy years, the skin is dark and wrinkled, his beard and white hair, faded jeans door, a black leather jacket and green cap with a visor. At his feet was placed a leather handbag clear. She looks older, has a male face, lengthened, with the same signs of the time, and the mouth is toothless. A woolen cap on his head, held by a pink scarf tied under the chin. He wears a shirt with a burgundy floral printed on a gray vest and a black bag over your shoulder. Peep under the skirt thick brown socks, another pair of socks that divides the men's fashion shoes. He would say both dressed recovered from some charity.
The children who received the candy by the smoker with the mouthpiece comes running in front of the pair, the stumbles and falls and starts crying loudly.
In Biserica din Deal, or the church on the hill, there are encounters Sighişoara unusual: a fresco in which the Trinity is represented by a head with three faces and the Holy Spirit has the appearance of a girl, a crucifix carved from a tree whose branches were trimmed only, a caretaker who wants to know what is known about the Dacians in Italy. He is keen to stress that Transylvania has always been an economically developed region with the presence of a large community of German origin. Unlike the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Transylvania in the Middle Ages belonged to the Hungarian crown, after being tax was the sultan after the Turkish occupation, in 1687 it became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Romania has taken away after the First World War. The presence of the Germanic peoples, however, predates the Hapsburg period, dating from the twelfth century, when the Hungarian king Géza II did arrive in the region a group of Saxon colonists. The first document is in Brasov, 1235, when the city was called Kronstadt. A second contingent of Saxons was called to defend the south-eastern flank of his estates by King Béla IV after the devastating Mongol invasions of 1241. Since then, the ethnic composition of Transylvania is the result of three elements: Hungarian, Rumanian and German. The Lutheran Reformation was introduced there in 1542 by Johannes Honterus, a humanist who had studied in Krakow and Vienna and taught at Basel. Geographer, cartographer, cosmographer and jurist, was launched in 1539 in Kronstadt the first printing of south-eastern Europe and in 1547 staged the largest library in the area. A small museum has been dedicated within the Biserica neagra, the Gothic church which was named after the fire that blackened in 1689. The floor of his bare interior is light wood, unpolished, and the columns and walls are, respectively, latte and ivory white in color. The walls of the nave are decorated with dark wooden stalls, while the ribs of the ceiling of the apse are of a pale green. The harmony of colors is improved by 119 Turkish carpets, hanging everywhere, who are mostly ocher with a mihrab red brick in the middle. Were donated to the church in the eighteenth century by the local traders returning from the Ottoman Empire.
One of the centers spread of Gothic architecture in Transylvania was the Cistercian monastery of the Charter, founded in 1202 along the Olt River. Today it is included in the tourist circuit that allows you to visit the fortified churches over twenty of the region, the central element of the villages Saxons. As you can see well Mosna, the plant of the villages reminiscent of a fish bone, in which the church is the head of a road from which the sides of which there are two rows of houses from the narrow and elongated. On the way, graced by a canopy of vines, facing the short side of the houses and their back there is the strip of land that was allocated to each family according to a criterion strictly egalitarian. The ethnic Germans were in the early twentieth century, ten percent of the population of Transylvania, but many of them have left Romania after 1989 to move to Germany. There is, however, a movement in the opposite direction: Germans are the funds that support the maintenance of fortified churches, as well as those that allowed the renovation of a building that now houses the hostel of Sighisoara.
View from the Balkans, the European geopolitics of the late nineteenth century resembles a game of Risk in which two players, France and Russia, are trying to weaken the other two, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, that at the beginning of the game, have occupied the strategic territories. In an attempt to strip the flesh off their possessions will serve the appetites of the weaker players: Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Kingdom of Sardinia, then in Italy, whose moves are often surprisingly similar and coordinated. After the Crimean War and with the help of the French principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia gave birth to Romania, whose independence was recognized at the Berlin Congress with the support of Russia, just as was Bulgaria.
During World War I, then, the exchange of courtesies became even more concrete. In November 1915, when the Serbian army was in full dissolution and sought refuge in Albania with the hope of reaching the Adriatic coast, Italy sent an expeditionary force to occupy the port of Durres to protect the right flank of the Serbian army routed.
In June 1918, concentrated among the prisoners of war in Avezzano, there were also Romanians, who formed a legion of volunteers for the purpose of fighting alongside the Italians. In the Historical Museum of Alba Iulia, you can read a letter in November of that year, Sidney Sonnino writes to the National Council of Unit Romena: "Italy has not forgotten how patriotic zeal with which the nobility of sacrifice Romania participated in the bloody struggle, now successfully closed, for the liberation from the yoke of common enemy and for the triumph of freedom and justice in the world. To the achievement of the most secure political and territorial rights of the people and the government of the nation Romania Italian will give its full support. "Similar support gave the French government and 1 December 1918 it came to the declaration of the union of Transylvania to Romania. Another bite of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire by the victorious powers was given to Romania in 1920: the Crişana and part of the Banat (Serbia went to a slice), regions that had become Hapsburg territories in 1718 with victories Military Eugene of Savoy. Today, following them, it is hard to think that they ever belonged to others, so the imprint is evident in the appearance of their Austro-Hungarian city.
Criteria admission imposed by the European Union have led Romania to restore officially bilingualism, multilingualism, and sometimes, in these areas, as seen from the train boards in which appear the names of cities next to those Hungarians in Romania. This should highlight the nature pluralistic and respectful of the diversity that characterizes the European Union. However, there are some who are skeptical about the prospects that the entrance will open in Romania.
in Sibiu, in 2007, the European Capital of Culture, ARTVO visit, the first private gallery of contemporary art. Daniela Turcu, curator and painter herself, shows me a series of paintings of the thirties Ciprian Muntiu, the theme is the entrance to the Union and the painter decided to treat it by painting a series of fish swimming in a blue that is the European flag. European commissioner is, for example, threatening the big fish that passes next to small fish. The title is more explicit than a painting in which three fish are stacked, respectively red, yellow and blue stripes of the flag of Romania: The Same shit .
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